Leadership enhancing the lessons of experience 8th by hughes curphy chap 01

What is Leadership?• Leadership is a complex phenomenon involving the leader, the followers, and the situation.. Leadership MythsMyth: Good Leadership is All Common Sense • Most leader

What Do We Mean by Leadership?

“Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime and, departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time.”

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

– American Revolutionary War Hero

• Aung San Suu Kyi

– Nobel Peace Prize Recipient

• Bill Gates

– Co-founder and Assistant Chairman to CEO of

Microsoft

What is Leadership?

• Leadership is a complex phenomenon involving

the leader, the followers, and the situation

• Due to the complexity of leadership, leadership researchers have defined the concept in many

different ways:

– The process by which an agent induces a subordinate

to behave in a desired manner.

– Directing and coordinating the work of group members – An interpersonal relation in which others comply

– Creating conditions for a team to be effective.

– The ability to get results and the ability to build teams; these represent the what and the how of leadership.

– A complex form of social problem solving.

Leadership is Both a Science

and an Art

• Bass & Stogdill’s Handbook of Leadership: Theory,

Research and Managerial Applications cites

approximately 8,000 studies on leadership.

• Some managers may be effective leaders without ever having taken a course or training program in leadership.

• Some scholars in the field of leadership may be

relatively poor leaders themselves.

• Leadership will always remain partly an art as well as a science.

Leadership is Both Rational

and Emotional

• Leadership includes actions and influences

based on reason and logic as well as those

based on inspiration and passion

• Since people are both rational and emotional,

leaders can use rational techniques and/or

emotional appeals

Leadership is Both Rational

and Emotional (continued)

• Aroused feelings can be used either positively

or negatively, constructively or destructively

• The mere presence of a group can cause

people to act differently than when they are

alone

• Leaders need to consider both the rational and

the emotional consequences of their actions

Leadership and Management

 ask what and why

 originate

 challenge the status quo

Leadership and Management

Overlap

Leadership Myths

Myth: Good Leadership is All Common

Sense

• Most leadership literature only confirms

common sense knowledge

• Common sense is ambiguous.

• The challenge is to know when common

sense applies and when it does not

• If leadership was simply common sense,

then workplace problems would be few, if any

• Effective leadership must be something more

than just common sense

Leadership Myths

Myth: Leaders are Born, not Made

• Many factors and formative experiences

influence behavior and leadership

• Research shows cognitive abilities and

personality traits are partially innate

• Different environments can nurture or

suppress different leadership qualities

• Leaders are born and made.

Leadership Myths

Myth:

The Only School You Learn Leadership from

Is the School of Hard Knocks

• Formal study and experiential learning

compliment each other

• Students must learn to discern critical lessons

about leadership from their own experience

• Being able to analyze experiences from

multiple perspectives may be the greatest contribution a formal course in leadership can give you.

The Interactional Framework for

Analyzing Leadership

The Interactional Framework for

Analyzing Leadership

• The interactional framework depicts leadership

as a function of three elements:

• Leadership is the result of complex interactions

among the leader, the followers, and the situation

The Leader

• Individual aspects of the leadership equation:

– Unique personal history

– Interests

– Character traits

– Motivation

• Effective leaders differ from their followers and

from ineffective leaders on elements such as:

– Personality traits, cognitive abilities

– Skills, values

The Leader (continued)

• How leadership status is reached is important

• Leaders appointed by superiors may have less

credibility and may get less loyalty

• Leaders elected or emerging by consensus from ranks of followers are seen as more effective

• A leader’s experience or history in a particular

organization is usually important to her or his

effectiveness

• The extent of “follower participation” in a leader’s selection may affect the leader’s legitimacy

The Followers

• Both practitioners and scholars stress the

relatedness of leadership and followership

• Aspects of followers that affect the leadership

The Followers (continued)

• The leader-follower relationship has undergone

dynamic change for many reasons:

– Increased pressure to function with reduced

resources

– Trend toward greater power sharing and

decentralized authority in organizations

– Increase in complex problems and rapid changes.

• Followers can become much more proactive in

their stance toward organizational problems

• Followers can become better skilled at

“influencing upward” by being flexible and open

The Situation

• Leadership often makes sense only in the

context of how the leader and followers interact in a given situation.

• The situation may be the most

ambiguous aspect of the leadership

framework.

Illustrating the Interactional Framework:

Women in Leadership Roles

• Women are taking on leadership roles in

greater numbers than ever before.

• Problems still exist that constrain the

opportunity for capable women to rise to the highest leadership roles in organizations.

• Research shows that there are no

statistically significant differences between

the leadership styles of men and women.

• Differences that were found:

– Women and men have different networking patterns.

– Compared to men, women’s trust in each other tends

to decrease when work situations become more

professionally risky

– Women’s commitment to the organizations they

worked for was more guarded than that of their male

counterparts.

Illustrating the Interactional Framework:

Illustrating the Interactional Framework:

• Research suggests that many women are

succeeding because of characteristics originally

considered too feminine for effective leadership

• Women tend to use “interactive leadership”

based on enhancing others’ self-worth and

believing that the best performance occurs when people have job satisfaction and feel good about themselves

• The interactive leadership style most likely

developed from women’s socialization

experiences and career paths

Illustrating the Interactional Framework:

• Four general factors explain the shift toward

more women in leadership roles:

– Women themselves have changed.

– Leadership roles have changed.

– Organizational practices have changed.

– Culture has changed.

• The glass cliff, a recently identified challenge

for women, indicates that female candidates for

an executive position are more likely to be hired

There is No Simple Recipe for

Effective Leadership

• Leadership must always be assessed in the

context of the leader, the followers, and the

situation:

– A leader may need to respond to various followers

differently in the same situation.

– A leader may need to respond to the same follower

differently in different situations.

– Followers may respond to various leaders quite

There is No Simple Recipe for

• The right behavior in one situation is not

necessarily the right behavior in another

situation

• Though unable to agree on the one best

behavior in a given situation, agreement can

exist on some clearly inappropriate behaviors

• Saying that the right behavior for a leader

depends on the situation differs from saying it

• Leadership is the process of influencing an

organized group toward achieving its goals

• Considerable overlap exists between leadership and management

• The study of leadership must also include two

other areas: the followers and the situation

• Good leadership makes a difference, and it can

be enhanced through greater awareness of the

important factors influencing the leadership

process